(Gong Szeto is a Sante Fe-based designer and inventor whose recent submission [pdf] to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge sparked our interest. We're thrilled to have an abbreviated version of his submission posted here. Note: What follows are screenshots of one possible way of fleshing out Szeto's vision. These are not (yet) actual working web pages, but are instead prototypes meant to spur discussion and further refinement. -- the editors)

YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a powerful new web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national levels.

In the beginning, the blog on Change.gov looked like entirely neutered version of what passes for a blog looks in the rest of the world. Soulless early posts like "President-Elect Obama...Calls for 'Swift Action' on the Economy" left me wondering if we'd just witnessed the birth of yet another press-release blog. And while Change.gov's blog posts are still penned by some unnamed staffer and there's no way to drop a comment either on the posts themselves or any of the videos on the site, some of the more recent posts raise hopes that Team Obama gets that the Internet has value as an almost-instantaneous feedback loop between the man in the Oval Office and the people he's elected to serve (especially after he's forced to power-down his beloved Blackberry).